Hooked On A Feeling
by reefy222
Summary: A love story between a nurse and a bear. She thinks they're getting married. She doesn't know the difference between that and stabbing him in the throat, though.


Her name was Sally Smithson, and she was a nurse.

Or, well, she was dressed as a nurse. In reality she was a tool – a fast-traveling bonesaw meant to saw bones when she saw bones. She was quite good at it nowadays, actually, despite having only had one night of practice before she was dragged off in an ambulance. What happened in the ambulance?

She didn't remember! She assumed she saw bones.

Either way, she did remember spider legs, only because now she saw them every day forever. They pointed her in the direction she was supposed to go, and she shambled through gate after gate into a closed-off section of the woods, or a farm, or sometimes an asylum why did she remember the asylum why was it familiar she couldn't understand it where she would just wander aimlessly until she heard the familiar pop of some idiot playing with electrical wires.

That was dangerous, but stupid kids did stupid things she supposed. She was a nurse, so her job was to shamble – or…. float, she supposed, over to wherever they were. Unfortunately, she had a case of voices whispering in her head since she got to this weird endless forest. While she fully intended to help them, practically sensing patients in distress, her hand that once reached out to tend to wounds was now more interested in making those wounds worse.

She would look at her hand and remember what was inside. Tsk, tsk, Spencer, she'd think, always a complete dick, weren't you? This was thought in spite of the fact that not only was she in complete control of her actions, the hand that channeled his dying breath was also not the hand wildly flailing a saw in the direction of potentially innocent people – both facts she was aware of, but she'd hated Spencer's guts even before she watched them fall out of his body.

Things continued this way for years. Forever and ever and ever and ever. Time was an illusion, and this place was nothing but the repetitive dance of kill or watch people run away out the gates because you cannot be killed. The monotony may have bored her, but she didn't really feel things the way she used to. That's what she thought for so long.

And then, she met a man.

Well, she'd met him before. Time and time again. She'd never really thought much of him as he was one among the many: Sneaky, annoying, too eager not to be devoured by an incomprehensible entity of pure darkness. But two things were different this time. For one thing, he was already injured when she found him. For another thing, he had a beard.

These two things are what drew her attention, and made her realize. Hm. He was quite muscular, wasn't he? Had an athletic build that reminded her of something, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it. She'd knocked him down in one hit, causing her to pause in momentary confusion, and in that moment she'd used her ability to turn him over. After getting a good look at him, beard and all, she felt compelled to reach out and – well, she initially thought to help him up, but instead she ended up violently choking him to death.

She stroked his cheek for a moment after the light faded out of his eyes, feeling the beard hair. Why did it seem so familiar? And then she heard another generator pop so she decided to move on with her afterlife.

The entity was pleased with her further sacrifices. Or at least she assumed it was – she wasn't exactly sure as to its goals. It didn't speak, but sometimes its many appendages emerged from the ground to bestow upon her and the others gifts that allowed them to reach their full potential. She tended not to use these gifts because it felt like she was empowering Spencer in some way, but she accepted them nonetheless, because she was incapable of expressing enough emotional range to be truly petty.

She found her own sad state odd, when she was capable of rationally thinking about it for more than two seconds. This was usually when she had the other killers to compare to, and even then only a few invoked the stirrings of emotion within her: The four teenagers, who had all arrived at once, and had sometimes shoved her around trying to invoke a reaction. They still did it even when she cut one's arm off once, because that didn't matter for more than five minutes here. Also that lady with the strange headwear, because any time anything tried to annoy her she would yell at it in some indecipherable foreign language and whack it with her… "profanity censor"? The nurse couldn't remember what it was called, but then again it was amazing she could even remember her own name.

There was also the Doctor, but she didn't talk to him. She didn't talk to anybody, only really capable of making strange wheezing noises that sometimes passed for an attempt at speaking, but still. Professional courtesy went out the window when they ended up in Hell.

Things continued on as they were for a time. Her thoughts never really wandered back to that charmingly rugged man who she had passionately choked to death, because she had passionately choked quite a few people to death by now and what made him so special? Was it the way his blood coagulated instantaneously for no apparent reason? His loud, injured breathing that gave away his position so she would always find him? The way that he managed, without help, to get up even when he was so close to death to allow her to keep chasing him?

She absolutely was not thinking about any of these things, nope.

Until she saw him again.

She made an active effort not to focus on him. He didn't seem to be injured this time, which was just rude, so she injured him once and then made only a half-hearted effort to continue chasing him. What was the point if he was so clearly only interested in getting away? So she sacrificed literally all the others first, breaking all their generators until she could potentially back him into a corner. How dare he play with her fragile undead heart, making her think he was special for a minute. She floated around looking for the hatch, eager to assure he could not escape, but when she found it, seeing it from afar…

There he was.

He did not immediately leave.

Rather, he did some sort of odd, crouching dance with his legs. He did not jump into the hatch the moment he saw her, either. Was he waiting for her? She blinked over, rather than simply floating, to assure she caught him in time, but he still did not make any move to leave even as she had to catch her breath. She stared at him, for some long moments, wondering what he was doing.

And then she stabbed him, because she wasn't sure exactly what he wanted.

When he fell, though, she did not pick him up. Instead he did some odd little circular motion that didn't seem like it should even be humanly possible to do so fast, with him barely moving his limbs. She spun in a slow, floating circle, mimicking him. This seemingly pleased him, and so he crawled out through the hatch at long last. She let him.

What just happened, even, the fuck-

These kinds of things began to happen more frequently. Not every time she saw him, as sometimes he was hard to keep up with and acted like he didn't know exactly what she was referring to when she tried to repeat those movements. More and more frequently, however, she found herself taking him down to the basement's back hook, no matter how much he struggled. Sometimes he got away while she made the trip, but she'd just find him and knock him back down again every time.

She knew nothing about him beyond his looks and these strange rituals he did not consistently enact. She did not know his name, and as he had no real reason to tell her she accepted maybe he never would. But one day, she found herself walking along the dark halls of the last remaining ward of that dreaded place. The scattered remnants of those that were once entrapped there discomforted what little was left of her mind, but she could swear that she heard somebody breathing in here.

Her own wheezing breath slowed to a stop as she paused, listening. There was no noise but the whispers in her own mind. They usually whispered nonsense, and did so even now, but there was one thing she caught within the nonsense, one thing that was familiar, one thing that had her wheezing with some sort of deranged, desperate laughter.

Andrew.

The next time she saw him, she had attached to him the name despite not knowing for sure if it was his. She couldn't tell if he was familiar. She could barely even remember the name. However, she knew that attached to the name was a career path – that of a lumberjack, and with the beard he sometimes looked quite lumberly, she supposed.

For a time she had a rather single-minded obsession with him, chasing him and only him until the entity took him into its sweet embrace. It made her a little jealous, watching it murder and then hold him so tenderly. She supposed she could do that, sometimes, but the voices drove her to appease the eldritch abomination that lay just out of sight behind the veil of dark clouds. So she would float on and kill all his friends, too. If she was lucky, he'd appear twice over in the same instance, and she would not question it at all.

Sometimes she didn't feel like sacrificing or killing him, so she would focus on all but him. Close the hatch, however, because it felt too easy. Wait until just before he opened the door to blink through it, and then stare right into those wide, fearful eyes as the doors opened and revealed her there. She chased him as he ran away, despite knowing he'd circle back around to this door just so he could leave. And when he got there, she stopped chasing him, figuring she'd let him go on his merry way this time, knowing all his friends were dead for the next few minutes.

She watched as he ran away, off through the gates. She stared after him, adoringly – but from his point of view, menacingly. He crouched a few times before taking off.

She hated when he left, but she loved to watch him go.

Some days he did not wander into her knick of the woods. Her hopes were crushed, time and time again. She looked up at the sky as she hoisted the last survivor onto a hook, watching for the entity to descend, asking in her head, Why do you hate me? It only responded by swallowing up the survivor into its recycling bin of a void.

She ran into that lady who seemed quite lumberly, though. Not one of those she was compelled to chase, but rather one of the chasers. The two of them crossed paths one day while the tall, menacing one was dragging a crying girl along by her tied wrists. One of the huntress's few daughters who had snuck out to fix generators with boys, she assumed. What a naughty child. The two killers merely nodded to each other as they passed, the nurse ignoring the kick from the child as she was dragged past.

She was beginning to wonder how to proceed in this odd on-and-off relationship of theirs, and decided to go back to the asylum. She wandered around listlessly for a time, before movement caught her eye. No breathing, though. She entered a room just in time to see the entity's many tendrils retreat back into the ground with a soft, disgusting wet noise, and there on the floor next to where she had seen it…

A wedding dress.

The entity knew what she had to do!

She waited for him to appear again. Wearing her wedding dress out and about when Andrew wasn't even around felt pointless, like the entity was toying with her after giving her what she wanted. But she could be patient. She could wait. His lumberly figure would wander in any day now.

And eventually, it did.

Luckily, he brought his beard this time. He seemed to not have it every other time he appeared before her. She thought what kind of wedding he'd like, and figured going under the chapel would have to do since she couldn't realistically keep his friends there any other way. So after a long and arduous process, as well as wheezing loudly up into the air to signify that the entity better keep them on the ropes until their wedding vows were over, she went and chased him down.

He kept running, and she kept wheezing. Why, love? We'll be together now, forever! He didn't seem to care. Luckily, when she lost track of him, she bothered going back down to the basement to assure their guests were still in order. Just in time to stop him from taking the first one down, in fact.

What a silly groom.

We are gathered here today, she thought, to celebrate this love… Oh, but she hadn't invited the priestess to officiate this marriage. She didn't know it would be today. She was so woefully unprepared. And yet she continued those vows in her head, as she hung him up on the back hook. The one that meant she loved him, for sure.

He had to say them, too, though! And in the first instance of willpower since she'd arrived in this damn place, she wheezed out a pained, "And…..rew…." as she lovingly stabbed him across the chest.

This confused the man, perhaps, for as he had attempted struggling and the entity had to hold him there on the hook, he very abruptly stopped struggling. In fact, the entire lot of them did at once. She watched in dismay as the entity took its bounty. However, despite clearly bleeding out and having been stabbed by no fewer than three giant spider-like claws, her beloved choked out only seven words.

"My name's….. David fuckin' Kin'…. Ya ahrse…"

And then he was gone, taken away in the arms of the entity, flying away from her…

Her initial thought was Who the fuck is David? And then, realizing the entity had ruined her wedding, she let out an angered wheeze and threw her bonesaw on the ground.

As the disgruntled nurse left the basement, all she could wonder is whether or not marrying the lumberly murderess was a more stable relationship choice. Then she remembered nothing in this world was stable, so she'd just try again next time.


End file.
